


I'll Be Home for Christmas

by nolaespoir



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Christmas, Holidays, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-26
Updated: 2015-12-26
Packaged: 2018-05-09 11:54:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5538902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nolaespoir/pseuds/nolaespoir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur comes home for Christmas one last time, but it's not the same without the person who knew and loved him best of all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll Be Home for Christmas

**Author's Note:**

> Scribbled and thrown together on Christmas day, just because. Un-beta'd, so any errors are my own. I hope everyone (who celebrates) had a lovely holiday!

His first-thing-Christmas-Eve flight had been delayed four hours. A snow storm was sweeping across the Midwest, grounding planes in Milwaukee, Des Moines, Kansas City. The terminal at LAX was overstuffed and loud, warm and pulsing with desperate calls home and bodies gone limp with exhaustion in narrow chairs. Arthur, who had always been kind of terrible at waiting, had finished a cheap paperback, and paced, and bought too many cups of burnt Starbucks coffee. He hadn’t thought of what was and wasn’t waiting for him on the other side of a two hour flight home, because if he had, he wasn’t sure a part of him wouldn’t have wished for his flight to be cancelled.

It wasn’t cancelled, in the the end, and he’d boarded the plane warily but resolutely. Something like loss and something like hope had seeped into his marrow, had become apart of him now. Somehow he’d fallen asleep immediately.

Arthur’s family was waiting for him at the other end, at baggage claim, bundled in embarrassing matching sweaters, waving wildly. People stared. Arthur might’ve felt embarrassed once, in his younger, more vulnerable years, when he had wanted desperately for life to be neat and catalogue crisp, and he’d believed in his ability to make it so with enormous grit and a little elbow grease.But life had gotten messy, messier than Arthur could’ve ever imagined, and this loud choir of overzealous faces were here for him, just him, and they loved him, and he wouldn’t be embarrassed by that.

Arthur was enveloped. His little sisters launched themselves at him, grabbing him around his waist from either side. His older brother slapped him on the back. His parents came up slower, took turns holding his close, and they smelled like home—like stale coffee and buttered toast, cinnamon and gasoline. His mom handed him a heavy coat, never trusting that he remembered how to dress for winter.

“Los Angeles has thinned your blood,” she always said.

“Mom, I travel for work all the time. I travel to places colder than Denver.” He’d spent last January in Verkhoyansk, February in Hell, March in Eureka. He’d lived in Canada Goose. But his mail came addressed to a bungalow off Abbot Kinney in Venice and his family refused to believe that hadn’t weakened him somewhat.

Arthur held his mom tighter. He accepted the coat.

 

Outside the sun was high in a flawless cornflower blue sky, and it was below freezing—one of the charms of Colorado. The air was immediately sharp and clear, shocking complacence into Arthur. They took the back roads home, clear paths cut through frozen grasslands, half-covered in melted, frozen snow banks.

He was appraised of the neighborhood gossip in the car. Who had died unexpectedly of a heart attack and who was getting divorced and whose kid was in rehab _again._ Some people had gotten old and had sold their too-big-now empty nests; young families with plump crying babies were filling in the gaps.

Arthur’s littlest sister, Amelia, still in college, who always struggled to be heard above the chorus, and said too-loudly, “Tom and Kathy asked about you.”

The car went quiet.

“Well. They _did_ ,” she said, defensive, after a pause.

Arthur cleared his throat and blinked away whatever was threatening to surface on his face. He wanted to ask and didn’t want to ask the next, obvious question.

Abby, next in line, answered anyway. “They didn’t act like he was planning to come home.”

Arthur could only nod and look away out the window, at the dilapidated fences and frail, dead trees, at the growing, encroaching suburban sprawl and strip malls full of chiropractors and craft stores.

It was better this way, he told himself. Better that Eames didn’t come home, better he wouldn’t risk running into him at King Soopers or somewhere else equally innocuous and familiar. It was still too raw, the scrap and sting.

The house smelled of freshly risen dinner rolls and a honey-baked ham. Everyone dispersed to their stations, to mash and baste and fold the napkins. The rest of the family would be arriving soon, aunts and uncles and the cousins Arthur couldn’t ever keep straight. The house would be teeming, and his mother’s Christmas mix would be playing over the din, and everyone would hopefully be too busy stuffing themselves sick to consider the mess that was Arthur’s love life. He could hope, anyway.

He emptied his sack of presents under the tree and retreated up to his old room to dump his suitcase and freshen up. His suit was wrinkled, smelled of recycled air and peanuts. The sky had gone dark early and even before he turned on the light, the bedroom glowed bright from the lights strung up along the house across the street, coming in through the blinds in gold slates. Arthur stood at the window and looked out for a long moment, taking in the familiar pitch of that bright outlined roof, the dark topmost window. The sight of it had once been so precious to him. So safe.

“Mom was worried you wouldn’t come home,” Abby said, coming up behind him, leaning against the doorframe.

Arthur startled and backed away from the window, blinking rapidly. “You’re my family. I’ll always come home.”

“What happened, Arthur? Really?”

Arthur stayed quiet. Abby came up beside him and leaned her head against his shoulder. He laid his head down atop her head in return.

“Mom’s scared the next guy you meet will be from LA and have family on Cape Cod or something, and that you’ll have to take turns going back to his,” she explained. “This is basically the only time she sees you anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” Arthur said, suddenly struck dumb with guilt.

“No, Artie. No. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, for whatever happened.” Arthur turned and looked at his sister, younger than him by half a dozen years and usually the beacon of such hope. Her face was wet. 

“I’ll get over him,” he insisted. _I have to._ “I will, Abby. I’ll be fine.” He had been trying to convince himself for months. One day he knew he finally would, and that realization made his chest ache all over again.

“Will you?”

“Abby…”

“It’s just… _how?”_

“Please, Abby.”

“I don’t mean to be mean, Arthur, I just—how does one get over someone they’ve been in love with since they were 15?” She looked up at him with big, sorrowful eyes. “Maybe it was earlier than that.”

Arthur shrugged. “Slowly,” he admitted.

Downstairs the door bell rang, the dog barked, his father shouted, “Come in!” and the circus began. Heels on the hardwood floor and gifted bottles of wine collecting on the front table—glass against glass against oak. A timer went off, feminine laughter brimmed up and over, drifting up the stairs.

Abby held him close, kissed his shoulder through his suit jacket, and said, “I’ll see you downstairs in a few.”

She left and he was alone again, with the lights and the hum of life that had gone on, was stilling going on, somehow, despite how utterly it had shattered apart right in front of Arthur’s eyes. He changed into a sweater, jeans. He ran his fingers through his hair to break it apart. He descended into the noise, a smile screwed into place, the warmth almost choking him. He let himself be consumed by the scene.

The wine disappeared, and the eggnog, and the cream cheese dip; at the table went the ham, potatoes, green beans. Coffee and a lopsided, vaguely charred pecan pie afterward, over a white elephant gift exchange that saw Arthur become the proud owner of a farting Santa doll. There were kisses goodbye, and dishes washed while _A Christmas Story_ faded out on the living room television, their mother making them turn their backs while she filled their stockings with oranges and chocolate coins and one tiny wrapped boxed each.

A single box of his father’s homemade pralines sat on the kitchen counter, a leftover party favor—he made them every year for co-workers, neighbors, extended family. Arthur checked the tag. _To: The Eameses, From: The Cohens._ His father looked at him sheepishly.

“I wasn’t thinking,” he said, sliding the box away into a corner.

“It’s fine,” Arthur said. “You can still… They didn’t do anything wrong.”

His father shook his head and patted him heavily on the shoulder. It was midnight already, and the wall clock in the kitchen chimed a simple, recognizable tune. Christmas morning.

It began to snow. The fire was snuffed out and everyone shuffled tiredly to their beds.

The bed in Arthur’s old room was over twenty years old, a relic from his childhood, when he’d been too lanky by half could starfish across the twin and barely reach all four corners. He was cramped in it now, and his feet hung off the end at the ankles, even with his knees bent up. The comforter was worn soft and faded, with faint baseballs and bats stamped across it.

Arthur flipped his blinds closed and turned toward the wall, his eyes screwed shut.

 

The sun rose bright the next morning, glinting off the fresh blanket of snow like so many discarded diamonds, setting the world on fire (with ice). Arthur awoke with it, made coffee and waited for the world to join him.

The house was silent, still and resting. He sat in the living room, curled up under a blanket in the armchair beside the tree, looking out at the neighborhood, at colorful bulbs flickering from within icicles. Arthur wished _home_ could stay just like this. Flawless, undisturbed. Full of possibilities.

Then there was a car, and it ruined everything, skidding around the corner and gliding into the picture. It stopped with a shutter half way up the driveway across the way.

Eames got out.

Arthur dropped his empty coffee mug.

He slipped far down in his chair and watched Eames walk down to the end of the driveway and stop on the pavement, looking over at Arthur’s house. Could he see him?

Arthur couldn’t stand it, and eventually he went looking for a pair of his dad’s boots to slip into. He pulled a jacket on over his pajamas and stepped outside.

Eames startled.

Arthur walked to the end of his driveway, mirroring Eames’s uncertain hunch, the shuffle of his feet.

“Hello,” Eames said.

“Hi.”

The street was quiet.

“I heard you weren’t coming home this year,” Arthur said.

Eames seemed to flinch at that, and said, “I wasn’t going to. I—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to encroach.”

“It’s your home, too.”

And it was, and that was exactly why Arthur hadn’t been able to eradicate the dull, unsatisfying ache coming home had so quickly caused. Because _home_ and _Eames_ had always been one and the same. Since before Arthur had memories there had been Eames, and they’d become boys together and then men together. They’d become _them_ , and that had meant something once.

Arthur wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to un-tie those things. He feared the joy of coming home would now, always, be tarnished and partial. He didn’t know if he’d ever feel safe and whole here again, like he always had, the place where he was known and loved.

“Do you remember the Christmas you got your snowboard, and we tested it by snowboarding off your roof when your parents were out? And we would’ve gotten away with it, if Amelia hadn’t been hiding in the bushes—“

“—Eames. Please. Let’s not.” It hurt too much. It was too soon.

Arthur couldn’t stand here and remember when they’d been thirteen and bruised but un-scarred, with wide innocent smiles and a conviction that they’d never need anyone else in the world but each other. Arthur had known, even then, before he’d known the quadratic equation or how to hold a gun, that this boy knew him better than anyone, that he wanted him to always know him better than anyone. Before he’d known the word for it, Arthur had loved him.

It was gone now. And it fucking _hurt_.

“Arthur—“

“Don’t.”

“I love you,” Eames said in a rush, taking a step into the street. “Arthur, I love you. Please.”

Arthur backed up. Eames took another careful step forward.

“Please just tell me what I did, Arthur. Love. Please.”

“I can’t, Eames,” he said quietly, turning to go.

“No, I won’t accept that.” And suddenly Eames was _there_ , wrapping his arms around Arthur, manhandling him back around. “We can work this out, darling, whatever it is. Just bloody _tell me_ what I did. I’ve loved you since I was twelve, since always. You can’t run away, Arthur, you can’t just _leave_ and not let me try to _fix this_.”

Arthur was suddenly confronted with the naked pain of Eames’s bright eyes, wide and wet.

“What did I do to make you stop loving me?” he almost whispered.

“It’s not that, Eames. It was never that,” Arthur said, going limp in Eames’s strong, familiar arms, unthinkingly.

“Then what?”

Arthur couldn’t speak, couldn’t say. His tongue had gone dry and useless in his mouth. He could feel Eames’s hands on him, holding him up, holding him together, like they always had. He thought there might be bruises there the next day. He almost hoped for them.

“It’s not safe.”

“What do you mean?” Eames’s asked, his eyes going sharp.

“Someone knows.”

“Knows?”

“About us, Eames. Someone knows _about us.”_ They’d always been careful, so _fucking_ careful. They took more jobs apart than they’d ever taken together—they bickered, they antagonized. They had apartments all over the world, under a dozen aliases, and they never arrived within a week of the other. They had a thousand different origin stories—academia, the military, street smart urchin turned savant. There were tall tales and short ones. They had always risked a once-a-year visit back to the nondescript subdivision where the story of them had really begun, out of loyalty, out of tradition, but they’d always been meticulous in burning the trail, scattering the ashes. From them, new stories were born.

The newest story was this, except it wasn’t a story. It was true.

“If you want to get to Arthur, get to Eames first.”

Arthur didn’t know how it’d happened but it had. Someone knew, and word was catching.

More people wanted to get to Arthur than he’d ever let Eames know. A lot of not-so-good people wanted to get to Arthur.

Because sometimes even Arthur made stupid choices, took bad jobs and paid for it.

He was paying for it.

_If you want to get to Arthur, get to Eames first._

But so long as Eames didn’t pay for it, too, Arthur could live with himself.

Maybe. Maybe he’d live. If he was lucky.

He didn’t feel lucky these days.

Arthur needed to get out.

He’d come home. He’d kissed his mother, his sisters, held them. And now he’d burn the trail, one last time.

He was getting out.

And Eames—Eames, who fucking _loved_ what they did—Arthur couldn’t ask him to stop, too. Eames wasn’t the retiring sort. He was a bang, not a whimper.

“They know, Eames. I’m sorry. I don’t know how. But someone does, and it’s not safe.”

Eames’s hands tightened on Arthur’s arms. There would definitely be small, imperfect fingerprint marks there tomorrow.

“Not safe?”

Arthur shook his head.

“Since when has anything about us or our life ever been _safe_?” Eames asked, his voice sharp in the empty air.

“This is different,” Arthur started. He didn’t know how to finish.

“Why?”

“Because, Eames. They’re going to go after _you_.”

Eames blinked, confused.

“They’re going to go after you, and they’ll hurt you, Eames. They’ll make you suffer, if they think that’ll work. I can’t let them think that will work. I can’t let them know—“

“—Know what?”

“That my only weakness is you. That I would sacrifice _anything_ for you, to save you. Even, well—you.”

“Us.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’d sacrifice _us_.”

“I’m doing a runner, Eames. This is it. I don’t know how to fix it this time.”

“Fine. Run, Arthur. As fast and as far as you can, if you think that will work.”

Arthur’s body sagged (was that relief or disappointment?), and Eames released him. He stumbled backwards, his boots crunching down the fresh powder. Arthur nodded. This was how it had to be. They’d had their years—more years of sweetness and love than either one of them probably deserved—and now it was time to step away from the table. The house always wins.

But before Arthur could steel himself, Eames reached out and entwined their fingers.

“You can run, Arthur. You’ve been running all your life. But not alone. Never alone.”

“Eames.”

“Darling. I refuse.”

“I don’t want to go,” Arthur whispered. “Not without you. But Eames, if anything ever happened to you, and I thought I could have stopped it—“

“We knew, when we first got into this, darling, that we might not get out. We both knew that and accepted that. And we knew it didn’t matter, because—“

“—We’d be together.”

“Yes.” Eames untangled one hand so he could palm at Arthur’s jaw, slide his fingers up behind his ear, into his curling hair. His thumb caressed where there would be a dimple, on a better day.

“Eames. I’m so sorry. I’m an idiot.”

“Well, I have always said, darling. I mean—who looks at a roof and thinks, ‘That looks like a good place to go snowboarding’?”

Arthur fell forward against Eames and sealed his mouth over his, hot and sad and necessary. Eames gathered him close and let his hands wander over his back, soothing his nape, rubbing the bone at his hip.

“I love you,” Arthur said, breaking apart breathlessly. He was practically panting. “I’ve always loved you.”

“I know.”

“Asshole.” Arthur smacked him lightly.

“I know.”

A door creaked open in the distance, and Arthur swung around find Amelia and Abby peaking their flushed red faces out the front door. His parents were at the front window, with his brother. They all gave a small wave. Arthur couldn’t see well enough to be sure, but he thought his mother might be crying.

Another door opened and then there were Eames’s parents, bedhead and tightly knotted robes, delicate smiles. His mother had a casserole in her hands and his father held a bag of colorful, haphazardly wrapped presents.

“What do you say, then, love? One more Cohen-Eames Co-Christmas morning spectacular? For old time’s sake?”

“Okay. Yes.”

And Eames smiled and wouldn’t let them be sad. He smiled and kissed Arthur, and Arthur kissed back, and their families hooted and clapped behind them, and for a long moment (for ever), Arthur and Eames believed it would all be fine. Because they’d be together.


End file.
